Sex, Tweets & Video Trailers

Who doesn’t love stories? Reading, watching, hearing, telling them. But writing them is hard. Ergo the oft-quoted Red Smith adage, “Writing is easy, just open a vein and bleed.”I have done my share of this soul and emotional cutting over the years. But my biggest self-inflicted injuries come from the struggle between writing for love and writing for money. Or doing anything for money. Which is why here I sit holding onto an almost (second place) award winning story ready to go to a publisher and yet not sending it out. I know, from all my wonderful and wonderfully talented author friends that the struggle only really starts once you’ve signed with a publisher. You are then inundated with jabs to the kidneys and throat from your editor, your marketing manager, not to mention your muse, who burns you like CRPS from the inside out, clamoring to re-slice that vein and move onto story number two.So here I freeze, blinded by the headlights of my oncoming writing future. And what does it do? Pushes me into action in a safe direction. An area in which I’m überly comfortable and six-figure successful: Voice. I’ve won Rita-status awards for my narrations. Several. But while even I’ve been cultivating new clientele and filling up my bank account and timetable with voice, my muse has been scratching the walls of my cerebrum sniveling, “Story! Must tell story!”Enter a biz idea I guess had been gestating for over a year. (A walking pregnant-and-I-didn’t-know-it cliché) Video production Uni-student (and daughter) Lisa and I co-birthed a book trailer business this summer. BookVidz.It actually is the perfect band-aid solution to my Gollum-like muse, obsessed with Precious Story and my hamster wheel of—will-I-have-enough-to-Retire-Finish-Supporting-the-Kids-Pay-for-their-Weddings-(yes, I know it’s a decade from now, but hey)Get-Away-from-Canadian-Winters-in-my-Old-Age--whew! Sorry, about that. Didn’t mean to drag you on for a ride.

Anywho, it’s going well. This new biz feeds my need to write. Albeit short form. But I’m good at short form. Years of working for ad agencies. Writing blurbs for magazines. Podcasts. Tweets. Yada, etc.Writing, producing and voicing trailers for BookVidz keeps me in touch with people I love. Other writers who’ve overcome their fears and left streaks of their souls between their pages. It helps me help them get SEO-noticed, reach wider audiences, dress up their websites and build up their You Tube channels. It showcases my award-winning talent, feeds into my daughter’s mad visual skills and unites the two of us in a venture together.Check out this latest trailer we just completed for Jewel Quinlan’s She’s Got it All, available for pre-order and set for release September 29th.

Fun, right? It was inspired by a John Grisham Interview Jewel had seen and we added an intro and extro that fitted this Ibiza Dance scene romance.As for my novel? It sits in my MacBook Pro, along with its half-written sequel and plotted out third in the series. Also accompanied by a plotted and first drafted Victorian paranormal. When will I submit them? For now, my Gollum-muse seems to swallow the line “when I can find enough hours in the day to give them justice.” She shuffles back into my veins, content (for now) to create trailers and pretty video-pieces for others, and therefore bask near the pool of writerliness.